OSCON 2012 Keynotes

New Keynotes are added continuously. Please check back to see the latest updates to the OSCON program.

Sam Adams, City of Portland, OregonMayor

Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, Oregon was elected Mayor of Portland in May 2008. Prior to being elected Mayor, Adams served as a Commissioner on the City Council for four years earning a reputation as an advocate for sustainability, public transit, transportation planning, the arts, and gay rights.

As a City Commissioner, Adams was Commissioner in Charge of Portland’s Office of Transportation and the Bureau of Environmental Services, and council liaison to, among others, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Association of Portland Neighborhood Business Districts, and Worksystems, Incorporated. In his role as Mayor, Adams is the lead Council member on Economic Development, Planning and Sustainability, Education, Arts and Culture, and Transportation.

During his tenure as Mayor, Adams has launched a number of initiatives... Read More.

Brian Aker, HPFellow

Brian has spent his life working on the details of how to build and scale out
systems. He is currently working on a new MicroKernel designed MySQL
called Drizzle and is building the plumbing required for a new generation of
large scale computer deployment. He also spends time working on Apache
Modules, Memcached, and Gearman.

In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The VirtualHospital, Splunk, MySQL, Slashdot, and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He calls Seattle his home since that is where his dog Rosalynd is.

In this keynote, Brian Aker, HP Fellow, will share challenges and best practices from his work with OpenStack software, including how a rich set of APIs must be developed in order to drive broad platform adoption as well as the need for formal APIs.

"Piers, do you want to do a keynote at OSCON?"
"Yes! What should I talk about?"
"Well... you know xkcd.com?"
"Yes."
"There's this strip over here. It'd be fun if..."
"Oh! Hell yes!"
So here I am. Saying yes.

Chris DiBona, Google, Inc.Director, Open Source

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Mountain View, Ca based Google, Inc. His job includes managing open source related compliance and outreach programs for the company. More information about Google’s open source program can be found at http://code.google.com/opensource

Before joining Google, Mr. DiBona was an editor/author for the hugely popular online website slashdot.org and he is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He co-edited the award winning essay compilations “Open Sources” and “Open Sources 2.0” for O’Reilly and writes for a great number of publications. He was briefly the Linux guy on TechTV, starred in Floss Weekly and speaks on a variety of open source issues internationally.

David Eaves, Eaves ConsultingOpen Innovation and Collaboration Expert

An expert in negotiation, open source and public policy, David advises the mayor of Vancouver on open government and open data. He wrote a chapter in the O’Reilly book Open Government entitled After the Collapse: The Future of Open Government and the Civil Service.

He publishes and is asked to speak on open government, policy development, technology and open source frequently. In addition to this work David advises several open source communities including Mozilla and serves as a negotiation adviser to several executives.

An open source community depends on its capacity to attract people and the efficiency with which it can harness their energy to create great software. While a compelling mission or killer product can be helpful, effective communities must be responsive and efficient in managing the diverse needs and demands of its members.

Paul Fenwick, Perl Training AustraliaManaging Director

Paul Fenwick is the managing director of Perl Training Australia, and has been teaching computer science for over a decade. He is an internationally acclaimed presenter at conferences and user-groups worldwide, where he is well-known for his humour and off-beat topics.

Humans display an immense capacity to act against their own best judgement. Whether it's putting off healthy lifestyle choices, writing our tests and documentation "tomorrow", or having just one more unit of something we know we shouldn't.
Learn how to patch your mindware, use cognitive prosthetics, and upgrade your memory to actually get done what you want to be doing.

Frank Frankovsky, FacebookVP, Hardware Design and Supply Chain

Frank Frankovsky is director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook. In that role, he is responsible for the company’s hardware engineering and validation; technical program management; capacity engineering and analysis; and supply chain operations teams. He also serves as the company’s representative on the board of directors for the Open Compute Project, and is one of the key drivers of that initiative. Prior to joining Facebook, Frank spent 14 years with Dell, where he was an integral part of building Dell’s PowerEdge server business and co-founded Dell’s Data Center Solutions business. Prior to Dell, he launched the industry’s first rack-mounted x86 servers for Compaq. Frank holds a BA in Marketing from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.

In this talk, Facebook's Frank Frankovsky will examine key moments from the history of open hardware and share learnings from his work on the Open Compute Project — a prominent industry initiative focused on driving greater openness and collaboration in infrastructure technology — to draw out insights on how we can create and sustain open source movements in hardware.

Danny Hillis is Co-Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, LLC, a research and development company that invents, designs, creates and prototypes high technology products and services for a broad range of applications including transportation, education, architecture, distance collaboration, advanced visualization, electronics and software.

Previously, Danny was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow. Before that, he co-founded Thinking Machines Corp., which was the leading innovator in massive parallel supercomputers and RAID disk arrays. In addition to conceiving and designing the company’s major products, Danny worked closely with his customers in applying parallel computers to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography and subatomic physics.... Read More.

Applied Minds CEO, Danny Hillis will offer an introduction to The Learning Map, a Shared Learning Collaborative initiative organizing online learning material to get the right content to the right student at the right time.

John Mone, Endurance International GroupEVP, Technology and Program Management

John Mone is the EVP of Technology and Program Management for the Endurance International Group, a leading provider of online solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. Previously, John formed Tributary Consulting, where he helped organizations accelerate growth through technology. As the former Global Head of Operations for EBS, the world’s largest electronic brokerage for foreign exchange, John led a three-year technology transformation that included the re-architecture of core trading platforms using open systems. Earlier in his career, John founded and served as the CTO of a transaction simulation and analysis software firm. He attended the United States Military Academy, received a B.S. from Rutgers University and holds an M.B.A. in Strategic Management from Wharton.

Through its ubiquitous presence in small business, Open Source has become a key, but unrecognized, driver of the U.S. economy. John will discuss the hidden impact of Open Source and what it means to contributors and project leaders. He’ll also provide important tips on making it easy to increase exposure of projects through code contributors and distribution platforms.

Sarah Novotny, NGINXEvangelist and Community Leader

Sarah Novotny is a technical evangelist and community manager for NGINX. Novotny has run large scale technology infrastructures as a Systems Engineer and a Database administrator for Amazon.com and the ill fated Ads.com. In 2001, she founded Blue Gecko, a remote database administration company with two peers from Amazon. Blue Gecko, was sold to DatAvail in 2012. She’s also curated teams and been a leader in customer communities focused on high availability web application and platform delivery for Meteor Entertainment and Chef.

Novotny regularly talks about technology infrastructure and geek lifestyle. She is additionally a program chair for O’Reilly Media’s OSCON. Her technology writing and adventures as well as her more esoteric musings are found at sarahnovotny.com.

Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media, Inc.Founder and CEO

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. His original business plan was “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators.

Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a founder and board member of Safari Books Online and Maker Media, and on the boards of Code for America and PeerJ.

Open source software was one of the earliest successful examples of a sharing economy that has had huge economic impact. But as alternative energy advocate Steve Baer once noted, ecosystem services are often ignored in economic analysis: when you put your clothes in the dryer the energy you use is measured and counted, but when you hang them on the line, they disappear from the measured economy.

Gianugo Rabellino, MicrosoftSenior Director, Open Source Communities

Gianugo Rabellino is the Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft. He is also a Vice President of the Apache XML Project Management Committee and Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Sourcesense.

Gianugo has a deep understanding of open source technologies and platforms, and brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the group of passionate and committed individuals who share his same enthusiasm for interoperability and openness between Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms.

Irene Ros, BocoupSenior Programmer

Irene is a Senior Developer and Data Visualization Specialist at Bocoup. Most recently Irene has been working with the Guardian Interactive Team in the UK on the Miso Project, an open source toolkit designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content.

Before Bocoup, Irene spent 3 years working at IBM Research’s Visual Communication Lab as a data visualization research developer. Together with her team she helped build Many Eyes – a collaborative data visualization creation and sharing tool and Many Bills – a visual interface to reading congressional legislation. Her work has been written about in the New York Times and the New York Times Open Blog, as well as Fast Company.

Open source fuels engineers' professional and personal development as well as our client work. By doing so, we've created a sustainable environment that is driven by purpose. I will share some of the principles we've adopted and how we managed to make it work.

Mark R. Shuttleworth, Canonical Ltd.Founder

Mark is founder of Ubuntu, a popular free operating system for desktops and servers. Ubuntu is beautiful, easy to use and precision engineered for consumers and large-scale enterprise deployments alike. It has been adopted by an amazing number of people, from families that just want a PC that works for safe web surfing, to heavy industry, massive cloud computing environments, supercomputers, several armies, national police forces, banks and schools in the Amazon.

Mark leads product strategy and design at Canonical, which sells commercial support for Ubuntu, mainly to large enterprises and governments who deploy it professionally. Canonical also builds many of the unique elements of Ubuntu for desktop, cloud and server deployments. Mark champions design-driven development and has a focus on quality and cadence in... Read More.

Seamless work and play across phones, tablet and desktops is the goal of Ubuntu's design efforts. Mark will demo some of the latest inventions in UX in Ubuntu, preview new features that will land in 12.10, and outline the key areas of research and discovery as we move into a world where "personal computing" is being redefined and reinvented.

Kaitlin Thaney, Digital ScienceManager, External Partnerships

Kaitlin comes from Digital Science, a new technology company started out of Macmillan Publishers, providing tools for researchers. She’s a technologist, open science advocate, and data nerd who works in her day job to make scientific research more efficient through better use of technology. Prior to moving to the UK to work for Digital Science, she managed the science division of Creative Commons where she worked to enable better knowledge sharing and research. For more about Digital Science, visit http://digital-science.com. You can follow her at @kaythaney

The Web has transformed not only the way we approach modern day science, but a number of other facets of the research cycle: tools for analysis, mediums which now serve as “information inputs”, how we exchange ideas and even discover knowledge. Yet despite the pieces being there, changing practice is like trying to shake a castle.